Saturday, February 07, 2015

Last night I finished reading The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester for probably the third or fourth time in my life. For some reason I never really remember all the details of this book when I start reading it again. It's like a Level 1 has gone in and "demolished" that part of my memory. As always, it was an excellent read. I'll need to pick up The Stars My Destination for another reread sometime soon.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

I showed up at the Game Cave again tonight for the weekly Kaijudo tournament. I was using the fire/nature rush deck again, with a few more twinks made to it. I won the first round 2-0 after teaching someone how to play. In the next round I came up against a tough control deck but managed to win the second game after I got some cheap cards out quick. I still lost 2-1.

In the third round I played an all Fire deck for the first time and lost quickly to some Drakon Evolution cards that he managed to summon fairly rapidly.

So I ended up coming in #7 out of 12 again. Fun night and Dave at the Game Cave even gave me a free demo deck that should help beef up my rush deck some more.

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

So last week I bought Jack and I each a starter deck for Kaijudo, which is a recent game put out by Wizards of the Coast, who also produce Magic: The Gathering. A new gaming store called The Game Cave has recently opened up very close to my house, so I decided to head down there tonight and check out the Kaijudo tournament.

I took my Bull Rush deck, which is primarily an aggressive deck featuring the Fire and Nature civilizations. It was mostly just the starter deck, but I borrowed a card from Jack's deck and had a few cards from a booster pack also in it. I wasn't expecting to do well, since most of the guys there have worked diligently on building good decks, but I was hoping to win a few games if the right cards came out early for me.

Round 1

Twelve players showed up tonight, and in the first round I played a guy named E, who eventually won the tournament. E had a deck that he said had about $250 worth of cards in it and was primarily a Control type deck. I didn't really draw many of my cheap creature cards very early, so after about seven turns it was quickly obvious that I was going to lose. I managed to get him down to one shield in the first game, but since he had a lot of gold cards he just restored them and then brought out several very large cards that I literally had no chance to beat or defend against. I lost 0-2 in Round 1.

Round 2

For round two I played my friend Richard, who is also a relative novice at the game. He was playing a combination of Water and Darkness cards. Unfortunately, most of his cards required 5 mana or more, so when my cheap red and green attack cards started showing up early there was little he could do to defend against them. I won 2-0 in Round 2.

Round 3

In Round three I played a guy named Nate who also had a fairly expensive deck that featured a lot of Water and Darkness cards. I lost the first game pretty quickly, but managed to get some good draws early and beat him on the second game. I lost the third game fairly quickly though. I lost 1-2 in Round 3.

We were going to do four rounds, but the software wouldn't let Dave do that so we stopped at three. I came in 7th place out of 12 players, so not too bad for what was mostly a basic deck. When it was over Dave from the Game Cave had each player choose a booster pack type and then he opened them all and put the rarest card on top of each stack. Then we chose from 1st to last which stack we wanted to go home with. E the player from the first round also gave me some common cards from a pack he had opened earlier.

All in all I had a lot of fun for 4 bucks. The game plays fast and although you can spend a lot of money on it, I had a lot of fun for basically a 12 dollar investment. I look forward to tweaking my deck to be even more aggressive and see what I can do with it.

Monday, September 02, 2013

I showed up at the new gaming store in Hermitage called The Game Cave this past Saturday and thanks to my friend David Lowry I got to play Legendary: Marvel Deckbuilding Game for the first time, which also included the Dark City expansion.

I'm not normally much of a card game person, but it's hard to avoid them these days. I did enjoy this game however, and five of us managed to beat the Red Skull in a close call. I scored enough points to come in fourth.

I haven't played it enough to write up a full review of the game yet, but I did enjoy it a lot and look forward to playing it again soon.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Wow, my first post of 2011. I tend to do small posts on Facebook more now, so feel free to look me up there.

I was working in Chattanooga last week and staying at the Marriott. I've been doing a lot of walking for the last two months, and I've gotten my daily average up to about 6 miles, and have hit 7.5 miles on several days during recent weeks.

Since it doesn't get dark in Chattanooga until about 9pm this time of year, I have a lot of time right after work to go walking. Earlier last week I did a lot of walking all over downtown, but eventually I got tired of avoid panhandlers in certain parts of town, so I drove over to Lookout Mountain and parked just below Cravens House.

This home was built before the Civil War and by the end of it was mostly demolished, but the owner rebuilt it afterwards and it sits on a big ledge a few hundred feet below the summit. Several trails branch off from it and I chose to go down the Rifle Pits trail until it intersected with the Upper Truck trail. My legs were feeling pretty rubbery from the walking earlier in the week, so I avoided some of the other trails that had a lot of elevation change.

The Rifle Pits trail was a bit rough, and mostly downhill from the Cravens House, but was not too difficult. The Upper Truck trail is basically a dirt road, but is maintained as a bike path so it doesn't have too many ruts and is fairly level. It was really pretty, but unfortunately you can still hear the traffic from I24, at least on the section I was on. I went down to the trail that goes up to Sunset Rock, but turned back there since I was trying to avoid going up the mountain at that point.

On the way back I kept going past the Rifle Pits trail head, and the trail ran into a road that led right back to my car. I ended up going about 3 miles total and still had plenty of daylight. I'll be back in Chattanooga next week so I'll probably try to go a little further next time since I know the basic layout of the area now.